Networking refers not just to collaboration between multiple users, but also collaboration between computer systems. Virtually every enterprise is running a plurality of separate computer systems. These systems often depend on each other to serve specific purposes. A computer system cannot work properly and provide the expected functionality if connectivity to another computer system is not established. An example of such symbiosis is an application server for running business applications in communication with at least one of a database server, a messaging server, and a legacy computer system.
There are different approaches for establishing communication between separate computer systems. The physical connectivity between the systems could be logically managed by a connectivity framework or a connectivity service to channel the information exchange. One or more connectivity services may be implemented in an application server to maintain communication to one or more remote systems. A set of connectivity objects is created and maintained in a connectivity service on an application server. Each connectivity object provides connections to a remote system to be used by a business process running on the application server when needed to access to the remote system. The connectivity objects may be manually established in accordance with the requirements. Alternatively, they may be setup automatically when an application is deployed on an application server (see US Patent application publication No. US 2005-0267918 A1).
In this application the terms connectivity service, connectivity object and connection are defined as follows.
Typically, when the connectivity is setup automatically, an application software archive packs instructions for establishing connectivity objects to specific remote systems, e.g. database server, messaging server, legacy system. Following the instructions, the connectivity objects are established when the application is deployed on an application server. These connectivity objects could be used only by the application which has delivered the instructions, and by those applications which have a reference to them. There are services and libraries which may also need to use the connectivity objects, established during application deployment. However, if the application is not running, application deployed connectivity is not available.